Emily Feng
Appearances
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
Growing up in China in the 1970s, listener Anna Wong remembers how fellow students would secretly tune into Voice of America's shortwave broadcasts. She says listening to VOA was illegal, punishable in some cases by the death penalty. So Wang says later on, even as China relaxed politically, fellow university students surreptitiously listened to VOA under thick blankets in their dorms at midnight.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
VOA was seen as so subversive, it was nicknamed the D-Type or Enemy Channel in China. It served as a kind of underground transmission for both news and for sharing sounds of resistance, including this song. A song about homesickness and hometowns, beloved by students who were forcibly exiled to the Chinese countryside starting in the 1950s.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
VOA broadcast the song, boosting its popularity even when the song was officially banned. And as China entered the political foment of the 1980s, VOA's unvarnished reports in English and Mandarin became even more influential.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
This is Zhou Fengsuo, who became a student leader in mass democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. His student union at Beijing's Tsinghua University started broadcasting VOA from its speakers.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
because state media refused to cover the protests. When Beijing sent in tanks to quell the student demonstrators, these VOA reports on the fatal crackdown in Tiananmen Square were broadcast globally. VOA's focus on highlighting dissent meant it was popular among Republican politicians in the U.S., but invariably despised by authoritarian governments abroad.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
And with its potential closure after Trump ordered the agency that funds it to be dismantled... China's ruling Communist Party must be the happiest people in the world right now, says Wu Xiaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer. By the 1990s, listening to VOA had become less sensitive in China, and more and more Chinese people tuned in to learn English.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
Lucy Hornby, a longtime China-focused journalist, was teaching in China at the time, and one student of hers in particular loved VOA.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
Now VOA has come under criticism by Trump allies for being too expensive, and they say sympathetic to American adversaries. Hornby says the broadcaster positively shaped perceptions of the U.S. abroad.
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Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
The impact went both ways. VOA trained generations of Chinese-speaking journalists. They covered on-the-ground news in China to a degree of detail unmatched by other Western outlets. Many who listened saw VOA as a window for people in China to understand the world and for the world to know what was going on in China.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
It began really in the early 1980s in the middle of the Cold War under President Ronald Reagan. At the time, the U.S. was competing with the Soviet Union both for political influence but also in the ideological sphere. And so Reagan gave a speech in 1982 where he spoke about funding what he called the infrastructure of democracy.
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And what resulted is billions of dollars in foreign assistance funding through agencies like USAID, through the State Department, and then the creation of other foundations like the National Endowment of Democracy.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
And when the Cold War ended, all that funding evolved into going to support humanitarian work abroad, civil society work around the world, especially in countries that are authoritarian or were devastated by war. So think countries like Iran or China or now Ukraine.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
It's been done under the umbrella of trying to shrink the federal government and its budget. And it's really been driven by Elon Musk and President Trump. Musk has also accused these agencies that I just mentioned of, for example, USAID, of being behind what he called a hoax of Russian influence in the Trump administration.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
He also said the USAID agency spreads leftist propaganda without giving evidence. And then he's also been resharing posts on X, the social media site that he owns that has implied the National Endowment for Democracy is a CIA front. Again, no evidence. But what's interesting to me is this is exactly the same kind of criticism that authoritarian countries like China have long said about U.S.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
foreign assistance funding. And this reversal now on cutting, you know, cutting foreign assistance funding is is notable because this was actually kind of an issue that Republicans have long championed, especially Republicans like Marco Rubio, who is now the U.S. Secretary of State. He's now in charge of defending and implementing these foreign assistance cuts. But when he was a U.S.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
senator, he was a big proponent of foreign aid. He saw it as essential to U.S. national security by promoting U.S. democratic values abroad. And he said that cutting it would not bring us to balance. But now he's been a big defender of these cuts.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
Yeah. U.S. funding was supporting basically the last remaining traces of Chinese civil society. And with the cuts, China has not said very much publicly because, honestly, they could just sit back and do nothing to reap the benefits of this U.S. retreat and funding soft power.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
Because the groups that are seeing their funding cut are the ones that really were a long-term nuisance to China I'm talking about. labor rights organizations, civil society groups, human rights investigation organizations. A lot of them had been forced to flee from China, given the political controls there. And that's why they needed funding from the U.S.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
And I talked to seven of these groups focused on China, but now based in the U.S. Because they don't have funding anymore, they are already furloughing or laying off their employees. And a lot of them have paused their programs. Now, there's evidence that China's moving in already to fill this U.S. funding gap in just the last few weeks. Big caveat, funding soft power is not China's strong suit.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
They're often really heavy handed about it or inefficient, but they're making an effort. And I actually managed to talk directly with a Chinese state representative here in D.C. who answers to the government and China. They requested anonymity when meeting because they're not authorized to speak publicly. But they're here in the U.S.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
because they reached out to at least one China-focused group who is at risk of losing their funding and proposed to this group. You know, instead of criticizing people and organizations in China publicly, perhaps they, as a Chinese government representative, could facilitate private conversations with China to achieve the social change that the organization wants.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
And one of the groups that this representative was in contact with said they kind of felt like this was a tactic to buy their silence. But the Chinese representative argued it was a more effective way for organizations to work. So you're already seeing this competition between the U.S. and China given the risk of losing all the civil society funding.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
I would argue this matters because the US and China have been competing on technology, on political influence, on industrial standards, and definitely on soft power. And the US is cutting back its foreign presence and its foreign assistance funding at the very moment that China has stepped up and pledged tens of billions of dollars more to in places like Africa.
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Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
And so the potential trade-offs have never been bigger.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
So rehab as a policy will take years to implement, and there's been a lack of judicial oversight. The number of court cases that successfully found a police officer guilty of extrajudicial killings, or EJKs, is in the single digits. The Philippines left the International Criminal Court in 2019 after the court said it would investigate EJKs.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Perhaps the biggest complication, however, is people here still support former President Duterte. Duterte and his daughter, Sarah, remain highly influential.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Even by drug users themselves. Like this other patient we met at the rehab clinic. A former scuba diving instructor caught last year for dealing large amounts of shabu. We're not naming him because of medical privacy laws as well.
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This is despite the fact that he says he's had friends shot dead for selling drugs. And he could have met the same fate. What about people who were killed under the war on drugs? Did you see that as an issue or feel unsafe because of that?
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
As in, it's the victim's fault. They should have known the price of doing drugs was potential execution.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
I also went to Novotas, a slum neighborhood outside Metro Manila that has had one of the highest concentrations of killings under Duterte. Along the sewage-clogged river in Novotas, residents show me where a 17-year-old boy named Jemboy Baltazar was shot to death by police last August, during the second year of Marcos' presidency.
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First, there's going to be an initial hearing where the charges will be formally presented. Then his legal team will have a chance to respond to those charges. And if a judge decides there is sufficient evidence, the case will move to a trial. That will likely last many months. And in a statement Duterte released on his way to The Hague, he said he expects a long legal battle.
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Jemboy had been with a friend, cleaning his fishing boat that morning when he was shot by police. His uncle dragged the body out of the water. Jemboy's father, Jesse Baltazar, also ran over when he heard the news. He says he saw his son's body floating in the shallows of the river and cried to the police. I thought you said you'd only fired warning shots.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Police later said they'd gotten intel his son was an accomplice to another crime and possibly selling drugs, something a court later found not true. But Baltazar's sister Jessa says casting the victims of extrajudicial killings as drug sellers is pervasive and is used so law enforcement avoid prosecution.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
She says when Jemboy's body was in the river, she saw someone connected to the police try to plant drugs on her brother's body. The Baltazars brought the police to court. Turns out the police had mistaken Jemboy for another guy. And Jemboy's case made national headlines when the five officers involved were fired with one given an extremely rare sentence of four years in prison.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Still, the family points out there is plenty wrong with the case. For example, the same police unit who killed Jemboy also investigated the killing. The Balthazar family and the case's star witnesses are now in hiding. They fear the same police officers who killed Jemboy will take revenge on them. I visited them at their hiding place. It's peaceful, by the ocean.
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Sonny Agustillo, Gemboy's childhood best friend who was in the boat with him when he was shot, is hiding here too. Just 20 years old, he says he does not know what his future holds.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Jemboy's mother Rhoda says her only mission in life now is revenge. She says she cannot accept that Jumboi's killing was a mistake by the police. My son was shot 10 times, she says. If it were a mistake, he would have been shot once. But he was shot 10 times by different officers. How can you call that a mistake? And the cycle of violence continues.
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Less than a month after her son's funeral, Gemboy's friend, 20-year-old Daniel Soraya, was shot dead by an unknown assailant. Daniel Soraya, another death, and this time an unsolved murder. We met his mother, Irina Soraya, the night before what would have been her son's 21st birthday. She looked so young herself.
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Soraya says, I could not believe my son was dead. It was like my world was ending. We were sitting next to the San Lorenzo Ruiz Parish Church where several Catholic brothers and priests have set up a cooperative making votive candles to give the families of the dead some meaningful employment.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Despondent that she may never get justice with law enforcement, Soraya has instead turned to the Catholic Church for solace. As she tells us her story, the woman around her cluck in sympathy while they shape votive candles. They're melting and shaping raw wax and cutting candle wicks. Every one of them has lost loved ones in the war against drugs.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
One of them, who everyone calls Mother Marianne, cannot hold herself back.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
There have been very few successful prosecutions to date. And families hope they might get some justice after all these years. But there's also a lot of backlash in the Philippines. After the ICC started investigating Duterte in 2019, he withdrew the Philippines from membership in the court. And now Duterte's main political rival, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is the current president of the Philippines.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
The culture is still the same, as is the culture of impunity in the police and the government. It's the status quo.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
I don't think she has the energy to agree or disagree. She shuffles the bags of rice noodles with her, her son's favorite snacks. She had actually been on her way to his grave to wish him a happy birthday before she sat down with me. But she stays a bit, starting to make votive candles even though she's not yet officially part of the cooperative.
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The week before, she tells me, she submitted her application to join the circle of grieving women. The application is being processed. Candle making is a way for her to make some extra cash and to be around people who give her comfort because they've been through the same kind of pain. This is where she thinks she belongs now.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
There has not been much done. The International Criminal Court did open a probe on the war on drugs, but no one has been charged. Marcos is not cooperating with the court, and the Philippines is no longer part of the ICC, actually, despite the fact that more than half of Filipinos in a recent poll said they are in favor of the court's investigation.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Meanwhile, Duterte and his daughter, Sarah, who was also a politician, remain highly influential from their base in Davao City. This is in the Southern Philippines. And listen, compared to the dozens of people a day who were being killed in 2016, 2017, during the height of the killing, the numbers of EJKs now are lower. But three to 400 people are still being killed a year.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
And that's probably three to 400 people too many.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
One of the challenges is this normalization of violence. People become desensitized to it. They become more willing to tolerate brutal policing policies because they think it may end this cycle of death and violence. But based on my reporting, I don't think it does.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
And perhaps infamously, the Duterte and Marcos families have not been getting along. So last year, Duterte's daughter, Sarah, who is also the country's vice president now, said she fantasized about beheading Marcos Jr. and said she'd hired an assassin to kill him if needed. So the two do not like each other.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Plus, Duterte still has a lot of supporters in the Philippines, and they say Duterte's arrest is not about justice. but about President Marcos trying to eliminate his political rival. All said, this arrest has totally divided the country, and it's played into this Marcos-Tuterte family feud that defines the country's politics.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
And I want to note that although extrajudicial killings have slowed by a lot since Marcos took office, they have not stopped completely. There are hundreds of people a year still being murdered in their homes or on the streets over any suspicions that they use or sell drugs.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
That's right. For this story, I started by visiting a poor area on the outskirts of Manila, the capital. One of the first places I went to was Novaliches. It's just north of Metro Manila, the capital region, and one of the most densely populated parts of the Philippines. Novaliches is a bit of a down-on-its-luck neighborhood, full of twisty, steep alleyways which seriously flood during storms.
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I came here to meet a woman named Tin. Tin is this wafer-thin young woman with big eyes staring out of a round face. When I meet her, she's balancing one of her children, a fussy baby on her hip. And what's your child's name here? Her name is Casitina Serioso. She's constantly caring for others. And until recently, that included her husband, Chrismel Serioso.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
She often worried for his life, mainly because police in their neighborhood here operate with impunity.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
She says it's a fact of life here that the police mount drug bust operations. Nothing really changed under Marcos. In Duterte's time, the police were killing people. And she says under Marcos, if the police say you are doing drugs, they can also do whatever they want. And Tin knew her husband could be a target because he sometimes used shabu.
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She says it took his mind off their financial troubles. Like many young men, he could not find a stable job. Last fall, she says a police officer shot dead an alleged drug seller who lived next to them. Tin pulled Serioso aside. She says she warned her husband to stop using.
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In 2020, he turned himself in to police for drug rehabilitation, believing this vague promise from the Duterte administration that those who sought rehab would receive perpetual amnesty. Tin says he was scared he'd be gunned down like so many young men. Tin says Sirioso briefly quit Shabu for a few years. He wanted to stay alive for their two children.
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But she says the stress of trying to make do and raise a family in the slums caused him to occasionally turn to marijuana and more Shabu. Death was still waiting for the 29-year-old, and it struck last October.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Tin says CCTV cameras show her husband being dragged into a police jeep. An hour later, Sirioso was brought to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. She says the official cause of death was lack of blood due to two gunshot wounds. The initial police report said the cop had shot Sirioso because he'd been selling drugs, a charge his family denies. Yes, he sometimes used shabu.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
But Tin says just because you use drugs does not mean you deserve to die.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Sirioso is one of 342 people killed in drug-related operations in 2023 alone, entirely without due process. This statistic, it's not coming from the police or the Marcos administration, but from a small group of independent researchers. They've made it their mission to document the true toll of the drug war on Filipino society.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
It has been a long time coming. Duterte became president of the Philippines in 2016, and that very year, he vowed to wipe out drug abuse in the country. And almost immediately after saying that, there was a huge spike in killings outside of the rule of law. These were known as extrajudicial killings, or EJKs, as people in the Philippines now call them in shorthand.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
In March of 2024, I went to the University of the Philippines in Manila and wound my way through the sunny campus to a shady office tucked in the back of one of the buildings because I wanted to understand more about how we have these numbers about extrajudicial killings. And it turns out they've been meticulously documented by this small team of researchers here.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
I met Ariate and his colleague Lara Del Mundo just as they were about to release their weekly report on the latest state-sanctioned drug killings. The figures for those seven days alone that March was 11 people killed. Everything is double-checked by Del Mundo and based on police reports, media reports, and security cam footage.
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In April 2024, the current president, Marcos, touted the new direction his crackdown on drugs is taking, insisting that it is bloodless. But given what he sees each day, Joel Ariate does not buy it.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Ariadne is a philosophy professor, and he kind of fell into this work as a volunteer and just found he could not stop, even when it basically became a full-time job.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
And if you don't do it, no one knows the real scale of the problem?
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
The Philippines police does release its own data on drug killings, but their figures are inconsistent and they're not released regularly. For example, for all of 2023, the police said about 47,000 people surrendered, were arrested, or died in drug operations, but did not break that figure down. They also did not respond to repeated requests for comment from NPR for this story.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Even Ariante says his figures are almost certainly an undercount. Another reason why it's hard to count is while stories of killings are common, especially in poor neighborhoods, many of these killings go unreported. But they're well known within the community. I met with a man named Romeo Grutas.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
He's the neighborhood president of a community watch organization in a region called Bulacan on the northern outskirts of Manila. When I spoke to him, Rutas said just the week prior, he heard five people were killed. NPR confirmed the deaths with the families, but there are no media reports and no police reports of the deaths.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
This is the kind of news that spreads through word of mouth, in large part because those who are killed are from these poor areas. Their lives are seen as dispensable. And also, in these areas, selling drugs is often the most reliable source of income.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
And over the next six years, human rights organizations estimate anywhere between 8,000 to 30,000 people were killed like this on the mere suspicion that they used or sold drugs like marijuana, Marijuana or something called shabu, which is a mix of methamphetamines and caffeine that's popular in the Philippines. Sometimes it was the police who were responsible for the killings.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Grutas describes corruption and a reign of terror by police in Bulacan.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Vruta switches to Tagalog to say, people are desensitized to all this death. When a killing happens, it's just an everyday tragedy. People barely take notice anymore. When current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over, he set to work trying to burnish the Philippines' international reputation and differentiate himself from his father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
The elder Marcos was ousted as president after a decades-long reign marked by violence and massive corruption. His wife, Imelda, is famous for having over 3,000 pairs of designer shoes. Part of a vast collection of wealth, the Marcos family accrued before going into exile. Bongbong, as the current president is nicknamed, is painting himself as a progressive leader, especially in the war on drugs.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
His office did not respond to a request for comment for the story, but President Marcos Jr. did hold a press conference in April of 2024 when the police had a huge drug bust. And he pointed out there that the police did so without killing anyone.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
Marcos Jr. also wants to focus more on drug rehabilitation, setting up more local treatment clinics to treat addicts, not kill them.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
I paid a visit to this public rehab clinic in Manila, one of the most established clinics the state funds. At any given time, it might have two or three dozen inpatient cases, people brought in by their families or, more commonly, ordered by the court to serve part of their sentence here, rather than face potential death on the streets.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
The clinic offers addiction counseling and therapy, and as one patient told me, moral counseling and so-called social etiquette classes.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
We can't use his name because he is still a patient and protected by medical data laws. He says he was sent to the clinic after turning himself in. He said he was using LSD, cocaine, and marijuana and knew the police were tailing him already.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
The man's doctor is Dr. Jose Bienvenido. He runs this clinic and is at the forefront of the country's efforts to mainstream drug rehab. But of course, the extrajudicial killings of the last eight years have made people fearful of coming forward.
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The Long Shadow of Duterte's Drug War
But more often, people were killed by anonymous assailants that residents suspected were linked to Duterte. And that's what's prompted this investigation. And now the arrest of Duterte by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is in the Netherlands.
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Dr. Bienvenido is cautiously hopeful at the turn in policy under Marcos, but says they need more support.